Green-speak: ‘Paradox’ is the new ‘hypocrisy’

The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management is now run by Ned Farquhar, a former Natural Resources Defense Council staffer — so look for more land to be put out of reach of development.

The Nature Conservancy is preparing a study that will enable the greens to attack renewables based on their land-use footprint:

A team of scientists, several of whom work for the Nature Conservancy, has written a paper that will appear in the journal PLoS One showing that it can take 300 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy from soy biodiesel as from a nuclear power plant. Regardless of the climate policy the nation adopts, the paper predicts that by 2030, energy production will occupy an additional 79,537 square miles of land.

The impact will be “substantial,” said Jimmie Powell, the Nature Conservancy’s national energy leader and one of the paper’s co-authors. “It’s important to know where the footprint is going to be.”

Ditlev Engel, the CEO of the Danish wind-energy company Vestas, said that anecdotal evidence about birds being caught in turbine blades and other environmental horror stories do not usually hold up under scrutiny. Unfortunately, he then followed up this comment with,

“Do people think it’s better all those birds are breathing CO2? I’m not a scientist, but I doubt it.”

Engel then tried to rebound from this depth of ignorance with,

“Let’s get the facts on the table and not the feelings. The fact is, these are not issues.”

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One Response to “Green-speak: ‘Paradox’ is the new ‘hypocrisy’”

As a general rule, critical consideration of claims, in any field, not just the environment, are a good thing. Hard to have science without critical thought. Accordingly, critical, holistic appraisal of optimistic pitches about the wonders of biofuels is generally a responsible concept.